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Sultana disaster received less attention than it should have, because it occurred at the time the funeral train of the assassinated Abraham Lincoln was traveling past huge crowds in Washington to the President’s burial place at Springfield, Illinois.

Sultana was in port, the Army decided that she could carry to the North a throng of Union soldiers from Confederate prisons, including the notorious Andersonville, who had assembled at Vicksburg.

Sultana swung ‘round a bend and began to labor her way past a cluster of islands known as the "Hen and Chickens," about seven miles north of Memphis, when her boilers suddenly exploded with a tremendous crash that was heard all the way back to Memphis.

One of the two Memphis markers for the Sultana is tucked away in a corner of the nearly inaccessible Elmwood Cemetery.

Part of the city's National Steamboat Monument, this Sultana plaque is engraved in metal and shows a photo of the ship's final and most famous photograph (the original copy of this photo is supposedly in the local library).

Marion, AR Early on April 27, 1865, the overcrowded steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Marion, Arkansas.

www.sultanadisaster.com /mems.htm (1155 words)

Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Tragedy(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)

But because the Sultana went down when it did, the disaster was not well covered in the newspapers or magazines, and was soon forgotten.

In 1863, the Sultana was built in Cincinnati and began sailing the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, mainly from St. Louis to New Orleans.

She was state of the art, including the most modern safety equipment--safety gauges that fused open when the internal boiler pressure reached 150 pounds per square inch, three fire-fighting pumps, a metallic lifeboat and a wooden yawl, 300 feet of fire hose, thirty buckets, five fire-fighting axes and 76 life belts.

The Sultana was a Mississippi River side-wheeler paddle boat that was 260 feet long and designed to carry a legal capacity of 376 passengers (by comparison the Titanic was 882 feet long and carried 2,220 passengers).

Between 7 to 8 miles north of Memphis, the Sultana exploded with a horrific sound that could be heard ten miles away … seconds later, a brilliant and violent fireball could be seen in the sky.

Without detailing all the problems of the ill-fated Sultana, it is recognized that the boat, which in addition to being grossly overloaded, had defective boilers that had been recently, but marginally, repaired at least three times and it was bucking an unusually strong current of the flood-stricken Mississippi River.

Somewhere aboard the Sultana was a ten foot alligator in a stout wooden cage...

Slowly, the worst of the flames died down, and finally with the mooring ropes still holding what was left of the Sultana gave up the hopeless struggle and sank, with a great noise of hissing and a huge pillar of smoke and steam rising toward the sky.

So the Sultana was gone, and it remained to count the dead and to try to find out just why the disaster had happened.No definite count of the casualties was possible because there did not exist any really complete list of the number of men aboard at the time.

When the Sultana exploded and burned, as many as 1800 people were killed—as many Union soldiers died on the river that night as died on the battlefield of Shiloh.

The article, "The Sultana: A Case for Sabotage," published in North and South magazine looks at the possibility that the Sultana was destroyed by sabotage; the first time, to my knowledge, that there has been credible evidence of sabotage investigated in 136 years.

Sultana herself, Mason the captain, Louden, and Streetor all had ties and links that went far deeper, and were far more involved, than a single act on a horrible night on the river near Memphis.

Robert Louden, saboteur of the Sultana, WAS convicted in a court of law of sabotaging steamboats on the Mississippi (Dec. 1863).

The 1888 newspaper article quotes Streetor as stating, “A torpedo in a lump of coal was carried aboard the steamer at Memphis and deposited in the coal pile in front of the boilers for the express purpose of causing her destruction.

When the Sultana went up river from Vicksburg, after having her boilers cleaned and repaired, the boat was a bit top-heavy because of all of the prisoners crowded onto her upper decks.

www.civilwarstlouis.com /boatburners/salecker.htm (12805 words)

Princess Trilogy(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)

When Sultana's niece is forced into an arranged marriage with a cruel, depraved older man and a royal cousin's secret harem of sex slaves is revealed, Sultana's attempts at intervention in their various plights are thwarted.

In the process of recording Sultana's life, the Princess Trilogy also recounts the lives of other women around her: her mother, sisters, aunts, girlfriends, women servants, as well as the lives of other significant women who she seeks out or meets by chance.

The veil is lifted and western stereotypes are destroyed as readers follow the lives of Sultana and those of her family members inside their own homes, without the covering of veils or the artificiality of the public ceremony with outsiders.

Sasson and Saudi Princess Sultana follow their earlier accounts of social oppression of women in Arabia with one that focuses on the Saudi royal family and how, despite its wealth and relative freedom from social conventions, its men continue to oppress women.

Although Sultana's husband is a more enlightened man, she reveals that even she has a drinking problem, brought on by the stress of helplessly witnessing inequities.

Sultana isn't always the most likable character- but, at least in the version written by Sasson, she freely admits this.

Sultana, 54, stands by his statements and is adamant he was held prisoner in Laos during the Vietnam War.

Sultana is commander of the Colfax Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States Post 2003 and also the Sierra Vista Community Center's president, Colfax Planning Commissioner, Colfax Veterans Memorial Building board of trustee member and a Colfax Pride member.

Sultana is suspended from all positions or duties in Colfax that have a requirement of trust.

Chester Berry, 20th Michigan Infantry, captured at Cold Harbor (June 2 1864), interred in Andersonville Prison, survivor of the Sultana disaster, and author of "Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors" (1892), died in New Jersey on November 22, 1926 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Sultana documentarian Mike Marshall's son Bradley recently created a searchable database of Sultana passengers that can be found at the River Rock Entertainment site.

The Sultana Association, founded by Knoxville attorney Norman Shaw, engraved their names in the Sultana monument at the cemetery, 2500 Maryville Pike.

The Sultana, the first ship from the Sultanate of Oman to visit the new world bearing the personal greetings and the representative of Sultan Sayyid Said ibn Sultan in 1840

Sultana is also a reconstruction of the 1768 schooner which was launched in 2001

Sultana was a very famous dacoit at Najibabad in Western U.P. in early 20th century

en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Sultana (227 words)

American and Arkansas History Music - The Sultana Steamboat - Education Resources(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)

Nobody knows exactly what caused the explosion, but it is known that a leaky boiler had been patched while the boat was tied up downriver at Natchez with the boilerman protesting the whole time that an extensive overhaul was needed.

Some of the soldiers and a few of the handful of other passengers and crew were able to swim, to grab floating timbers, or to lash together makeshift rafts.

A young man enlisting in the Confederate Army anywhere near the place that would become the Sultana's graveyard would have been likely to join a unit that would find its way to "Bloody Shiloh." Casualties were heavy on both sides at Shiloh, and both sides took an extraordinary number of prisoners of war.

www.arkansasstories.com /sultana-two (630 words)

worst ship disaster(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-17)

When the huge riverboat Sultana went down in 1865, the death toll was 1,547 even more than the 1,512 lives lost on the Titanic.

Shortly after the war ended, the Sultana was ordered to Vicksburg, Miss., to bring home Union soldiers who'd been held prisoner at Andersonville, a Confederate prison camp.

On April 14, Abraham Lincoln had been shot and papers were still following up the story The Sultana was relegated to a few paragraphs in the back pages and was soon forgotten.

As the founder of New York-based Sultana Ensemble, Yoel Ben-Simhon delves deep into his personal roots to strike that right balance -- drawing on the sounds of his Moroccan-Jewish heritage, while using his experiences as a professional musician in the United States to reconnect this music to the Arab classical tradition.

Now, with the Sultana Ensemble - named in the memory of his beloved grandmother - Ben-Simhon comes full circle, with a deeply personal album that was a lifetime in the making.

Bassist Emmanuel Mann comes to the Sultana ensemble via France - where he studied jazz composition in Paris - and Israel, where he made a name for himself as one of the country's top bassists; joining acclaimed ethnic ensemble Habrera Hativeet and co-founding the Bustan Abraham ensemble, which brought together Arab and Jewish traditions.

The Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends is a loose knit organization whose main goal is the preservation and spreading of the story of the passengers of the ill fated steamboat Sultana, that exploded on April 27th, 1865 and claimed over 1600 lives.

It turned out that their fathers had been close friends and, coincidentally, were the last two members of the survivors of the 3rd Tenn. from the Knoxville area to pass away.

Determined that the Sultana should not be forgotten, Potter researched newspaper accounts, the three existing books on the subject, and previously unused military and government documents." (from The Sultana Tragedy).